Today, Dan and Jordan continue looking at the past, where they find the trends of homophobia continuing on the show. Also, Alex reports erroneously on Swiss euthanasia, engages is deeply unethical sales practices, and warns of a 4th of July false flag terrorist attack that does not happen. Citations
knowledge fight damn and jordan i am sweating knowledgefight.com it's time to pray i have great respect for knowledge fight knowledge fight i'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys knowledge fight
dan and jordan knowledge fight he died Andy in Kansas.
Yeah, so I went in to take a look at it and immediately realized I didn't want it, but there was only the guy who ran the store in there, and so he came over immediately, and I felt this pressure that I could not leave without buying something.
I guess there have been sort of circumstantial curfews, like when there were protests, there were curfews enacted, and for the beginning of COVID, when things were surging, there was businesses closed earlier.
Talking about the culture of death, half of Swiss deaths dubbed suicide.
Half of their deaths, and it's assisted suicide.
So the Swiss have got it right when it comes to having a low crime rate because their whole population is armed, but they're also socialistic.
And the government is killing the people, and in many cases, even when they don't want the euthanasia, it's now happening in this country as well, as Wesley Smith at the Wall Street Journal has documented.
Right, and if it were true, which it's not, that half of the deaths in Switzerland are suicides, then you'd have to call into question, hey, all of them are armed.
From the coverage that you're hearing here, you would think that the news story that he's talking about says half of the deaths in Switzerland are the result of suicide.
Or as he clarifies, assisted suicides, which people may or may not want.
The reality of this story is that there was a University of Zurich study that was conducted on Swiss attitudes towards euthanasia.
The report reflected that there was a widespread permissive stance in the country that the practice has generally, as long as it's done with an altruistic motive.
Also, a February 2003 article in the British Medical Journal found these numbers.
Quote, Oh, boy.
Get the fuck out.
Get the fuck out.
So a June 2003 survey written up in the Lancet sought to find some data on the assisted suicide rates in the countries of Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.
This found 1% or less rates in Denmark, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland.
The data from Belgium and the Netherlands is a little more complicated, and it's not really relevant to our discussion here, so I'm not even going to get into it.
Anyway, the point here is that multiple studies had come out around this time that each of them very clearly put the rate of assisted suicide in Switzerland at under 1%, or even less than half a percent.
So where's Alex getting that number from?
He heard one thing, and that's possibility, what you were responding to.
I think it's also possible that he just didn't read the article that he's covering, and he just skimmed this part.
Quote, So there's that.
There's half of these deaths in German-speaking Scandinavia.
And if you were just...
I'm sorry.
German-speaking Switzerland.
If you just read that, you might get an idea of it.
But this was specifically a subset of terminally ill patients in German-speaking Switzerland that the study was considering.
So it's naturally a population where you'd expect the rate to be higher, and it isn't indicative of all the deaths in Switzerland.
This is just outlandishly sloppy work on Alex's part and serves as yet another example of why people who listen to him and think they're getting any kind of real information or the things that they're saying, it's based on an ounce of study, they're all being scammed.
If you believe these things that Alex is getting into, you're...
Yeah, I just thought it was very interesting in that they were saying here, their vice president for communications, Mona Williams, told the Times that the most important factor was a letter to senior management from several gay employees.
Apparently there was a gay rights, what was the name of this, let's see here, the Pride Foundation, a Seattle gay rights organization.
They invested in Walmart to get this policy changed.
And they were saying here that basically that this Mona Williams was saying we want all of our associates to feel they are valued and treated with respect.
Anyway, this is a story about Walmart releasing a statement that they would expand their non-discrimination rules to include gay and lesbian employees.
This was hot on the heels of the Supreme Court decision Lawrence v.
Texas, which found that having criminal sodomy laws is unconstitutional.
Tough to believe that that's where things were in 2003.
Walmart still was very clear that they weren't going to extend benefits to same-sex couples, but this decision that they made was still pretty impactful.
Now, if you were fired because you were gay or you were bullied by co-workers for your sexual orientation, you had some recourse within the company.
The New York Times article about this is remarkable as it points out that this made it so nine of the ten largest Fortune 500 companies had implemented rules against sexual orientation discrimination.
The only one that didn't was ExxonMobil.
And even more remarkable, after Exxon acquired Mobil in 1999, they, quote, revoked a Mobil policy that provided medical benefits to partners of gay employees, as well as a policy that included sexual orientation as a category of prohibited discrimination.
So here's the thing that always gets me about these bigoted shitheads.
I can't handle when they say things like, what about straight rights, or complain that gay people are getting extra rights when anti-discrimination rules are put in place.
They're so privileged and disconnected from the actual reality of oppression that they don't even realize that anti-discrimination laws that protect gay people protect straight people too.
If a company doesn't hire you because you're gay, they've violated anti-discrimination laws.
And if they specifically don't hire you because you're straight, They violated the exact same anti-discrimination law.
These rules are often looked at as being extra rights for gay or lesbian employees, but it's a broader idea of non-discrimination applied equally for all.
Folks like this caller just don't understand or care about that because he's a giant homophobe and because the very idea of people not getting a job or being harassed by coworkers for being straight is unimaginable to him.
And it's just such a bizarre misinterpretation of things to be like, this is specifically to make it so you can't make fun of gay people at work anymore.
When in reality, it's adding sexual orientation as a class of things that you can't discriminate against.
And, you know, the same things that protect...
People of ethnic minorities also protect white people from discrimination.
The balance between pro-choice women and women who say abortion should be outlawed or severely restricted is shifting towards the pro-life side, bumping that group into the majority in the debate of reproductive rights according to a new national poll.
51% of women surveyed by the Center for the Advancement of Women said the government should prohibit abortion.
Oh, so if somebody rapes you, you want to kill the child.
I honestly don't think that I've ever heard him get into the specifics of his anti-abortion belief, so I was actually a little surprised that he would have that hard of a stance, and that he would express that publicly, that even in cases of rape, people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term.
That's wild.
I mean, it's just nuts.
And if somebody can't understand why, explaining it isn't going to help.
Also, it took me forever to track down the article he's reading, but I finally did, and it's from the Washington Times, covering a survey conducted by the Center for the Advancement of Women.
The survey found that 51% of women surveyed, quote, say abortion should be outlawed or severely restricted.
They're shifting toward the pro-life side, bumping that group into the majority in the debate over reproductive rights.
There's no link to this survey, and I can't find it, so I really can't discuss too many of the specifics, but the article does say that there's a 3% margin of error, so who knows if this is actually representative of a majority.
Either way, this is supposed to be up from 45% on that side in 2001, so even if I'm being a little iffy on the specifics because I don't have access to them, it does seem to show a trend of lowering support for abortion access.
It does appear that this trend has turned around, as a Pew Research study in May 2021 found that 59% of respondents said that abortion should be, quote, legal in all or most cases.
The numbers look even worse for Alex if you just include women, because 62% of women who were surveyed said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
If you look at Gallup's data on abortion attitudes, it doesn't quite track with the results of this survey because they have historical data that goes far back on that question.
Based on the data I can find, I'm going to guess that this survey that's being reported on in the Washington Times is an outlier in the data or possibly the results came from a poorly worded question or options that people could choose.
Kevorkian was licensed to practice in Michigan and California, and his license in Michigan was suspended in 1991.
The Michigan Board of Medicine made this decision because they tried to file charges against him for assisting in suicides, but it turned out that there was actually no law against that in Michigan at the time.
So the board claimed it had, quote, acted under state law that gives it the power to withdraw the license of any doctor who acts in a negligent or incompetent manner or who administers drugs for other than lawful diagnosis.
patients had lethal medication administered to them, and because of that, the board claimed the authority to take his license.
So, Alex gets a call here towards the end of the show, after Mike's interview, and this caller wants a particular audio piece that Alex has played in the past, which is a Jello Biafra spoken word thing.
I think that his callers at this point in history are split down the middle of horrifying monsters and homophobes and people who have real pleasant conversations.
Not just different pronunciations of the same name.
Hamid Karzai was the president of Afghanistan from 2000 to 2014.
Conversely, Ahmad Shalabi was an Iraqi politician who would go on to become the president of the Governing Council of Iraq in September 2003.
He is the founder of the Iraqi National Congress political party.
The headline that Alex is reading is about Ahmad Shalabi, who played a large role.
Yeah.
Through relationships he cultivated with a group of Republican politicians over the years from the first Iraq war onward, his political party, the INC, was the recipient of over $100 million from our government.
Much of the bad intelligence that was used to convince the public that a war in Iraq was necessary, like the ideas of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's connections to terrorism, came from people associated with Shalabi and the INC.
By 2004, he'd fallen out of grace with U.S. intelligence services, who had strong suspicions that he was sharing closely held information with Iran.
the CIA had actually voiced misgivings about him and his information all along and suspicious connections to Iran but We want to start a war!
Yeah.
All this being said, it's really fucked up that Alex doesn't seem to know that Karzai and Chalabi are two different people.
He's presenting himself as the only person who can decode the secret messages behind the news that the man won't tell you, and it's clear that he doesn't even know elementary details about the topics he's discussing.
If I were Steve Pechenik, I can definitely see how Alex would be a perfect mark.
Like, exactly the sort of person that you'd be like, I can use this guy.
And another thing that I was thinking about, two things.
One, I'm really curious where Steve is at.
In this time period.
Yeah, because I know that Alex interviewed him for the first time in 2002, and so I know that they are aware of each other and have talked, but he's not been on in the time that I've listened yet.
I'm eagerly awaiting that first time Steve pops up.
He is a weirdo who doesn't believe people should pay taxes.
He also is on here because he has an interesting theory about juries and how if you're on a jury and you don't agree with the law, even if you think the person's guilty, you should just vote them not guilty.
Jury nullification of laws, essentially, is the push that Red Beckman's got.
So I would guess that Red Beckman would have a slightly different position if the conversation were about, like, an imam telling their mosque who to vote for, who to vote against.
Like, generally nowadays, whenever one of Alex's listeners calls in with a stupid paranoid theory...
Alex does absolutely nothing to reassure them that they're fine and it's not happening.
He actively encourages their paranoia and lends credibility to their fears.
Here in 2003, though, this caller, Hank, is worried that the man is listening in on his phone calls, but instead of saying that that's probably true, Alex argues with him about how it's not happening and it's probably not possible.
Anyway.
It's also interesting to me to hear that Alex is articulating this view about government surveillance programs.
He doesn't actually think that there's widespread spying going on.
The government's just revealing that they have spying capabilities in order to scare patriots into thinking that their calls could be listened to at any point so there's a chilling effect.
For many of his other comments, particularly more recent ones, I don't think that this is a position that he's consistent on at all.
Also, as the story goes, Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, so either Alex got that very well-known biblical detail wrong, or the hypothetical feds that are listening in to Red Beckman's phone are working at a cut rate.
And I think that they have come to the conclusion that it's not smart to put people on because when they listen to these conversations, they're getting an education and all they have to do is look around them and...
The feds have realized that it's not a good idea to put people on monitoring the Patriots' phones because they're just like, oh shit, these guys are right.
I mean, we hardly ever do this where we send out a free document.
You can just have the document if you want it.
But you'll also get it free if you get the two citizen rule books.
They have the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Constitution, jury nullification, the power of the jury, the grand jury, famous quotes, little color-covered booklet, 70-something pages.
Two of those, two silver dollars that are both worth $8 apiece.
For $24.95.
Okay, that's at cost for Ted Anderson, and you get the document for free along with it.
Let's bring Ted up for three or four minutes and dragging him on the air.
Ted, I hope people will get the Sotison rule books and the silver dollars and get the free document.
This is so important, especially on the eve of the 4th of July.
And if you want the DARPA report, the declassified document, Broad Board Agency Announcement 03-15, BAA 0315, Defense Agency Research Project, or DARPA...
Run by convicted felon, Admiral Poindexter.
Remember, he said last year that everything you do, every call you make, every email you send will all be tracked by the computers and by the government.
So, Alex is so, like, he's full of shit about this, and honestly, it's really pathetic, the way he's playing this game.
It's so clearly designed to get people to order things from Ted Anderson and Midas Resources, and hopefully get them on the phone with somebody who can tell them all about how important it is to buy precious metals.
So this document that Alex is claiming is a declassified report from DARPA is nothing of the sort.
He reads off the document identification number, and that alone is a huge clue about how poorly he's covering this.
A BAA is a broad agency announcement, not a board agency announcement.
The Army's website defines them as, quote, a competitive solicitation procedure used to obtain proposals for basic and applied research and the part of development not related to the development of a specific system or hardware procurement.
At very best the document that Alex is selling his audience as a declassified DARPA report is actually just a posting that a certain government agency is taking pitches for research proposals.
Various government agencies utilize BAAs to find people to conduct research.
For instance, the Defense Logistics Agency currently has one open to, quote, identify domestically produced materials from possibly reliable sources to substitute for materials produced by foreign sources or sole source producers.
It's DARPA posting a help wanted ad for a project that they called Combat Zones That See.
The posting was made on March 25, 2003, and would close a year later.
The project, here's how they describe it.
It's a project that, quote, explores concepts, develops algorithms, and delivers systems for utilizing large numbers, thousands, of cameras to provide the close-in sensing demand for military operations in urban terrain.
The reason for wanting to do this and explore this research is spelled out in the BAA.
Quote, As a result, combat in cities has long been viewed as something to avoid.
However, modern asymmetric threats seek to capitalize on these limitations by hiding in urban areas and forcing US forces to engage in cities.
We can no longer avoid the need to be prepared to fight in cities.
I read over this and I hate it, but I also understand the rationale for exploring this kind of research.
It's very specifically aimed at targeting a deployable network of sensors and cameras that can track specific vehicles over long distances, including within urban areas.
I get why it would be a valuable thing for the government to have during the Iraq War, but I'm also not naive.
And I think that the risk associated with the potential misuse of a program like this...
It's not something that's worth the benefit that you'd get from creating it.
I read a bunch of this proposal, the documents that are on the DARPA website, and I've decided that I'm against it.
However, I think that the way Alex misreports on this proposal actually does a disservice to opposing it because it's disconnected from reality.
If you want to take this proposal and warn people that this sort of thing has the potential to be gravely misused in the wrong hands, and its implementation in US cities would almost certainly violate people's personal privacy, That would be a fine thing to do, and I think it's a fine conversation.
It's just dumb to take this information and then use it to insist that this is a classified document that proves DARPA's doing this to us, because the provided evidence fails embarrassingly short of proving that.
It's counterproductive to report information this way, but it's probably deeply unethical and exploitative to use this kind of flagrant misreporting of this information to get people into your gold sales revenue stream.
Also, I can find a ton of speculation about this program on blogs, but for the life of me, I can't find anyone that provides specific details about what happened past the posting of this BAA.
I was able to actually find, though, the project manager, Thomas Stratt.
I found his LinkedIn page, and weirdly, combat zones that see that project is listed in his resume.
So it's probably real secret stuff that he was working on.
Yeah, if you wanted to say that our government worships the false god of productivity and capitalism, totally fine.
But if you want to say that the USSR broke up overnight because they were worshiping a false god, literally, like fucking ball or something, then you might be Red Beckman.
Now they've moved on with it here, but they plan to have it more sophisticated, drugging the population, using propaganda, what they call imperial mobilization in the PNAC documents.
Red, have you heard about the PNAC documents where Bush and Cheney wrote public documents?
Before 9-1-1 that they needed a terrorist attack to invade Iraq and other countries and that they talked about imperial mobilization and a new world order?
The PNAC document is actually titled Rebuilding America's Defenses and it was a report released by the Project for the New American Century in September 2000.
It's one of the disappointing smoking guns that 9-11 truth folks pull out to prove that Bush did 9-11.
This is because this sentence appears in the text.
The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.
This doesn't prove anything, but it's super fun to say PNAC.
Now, larger picture, the words Imperial Mobilization don't appear anywhere in the PNAC document.
They don't appear together, and each word doesn't even appear in the text on its own.
Alex is mixing the PNAC document up with Zbigniew Brzezinski's book, The Grand Chess Board, which uses an oft-maligned passage, including the words imperial mobilization.
The first time the term is used, it's used three times in the text.
The second time is sort of a rephrasing of what we're going to talk about.
And the second time was just saying that if Russia was more decentralized, it would be less likely to engage in imperial mobilization.
It's argued that U.S. influence in Eurasia is exceedingly important to world stability.
Possibly more to the point and more realistically, holding the most sway in that region is critically important to U.S. strategic interests, and the prospect of a hostile country having more sway is really threatening to our strategic interests.
The text envisions Eurasia is split into four segments on a board.
There's the West, which includes most of Europe, where the US is said to have a foothold on the chessboard.
There's the East, which is basically China, Japan, North and South Korea, as well as Southeast Asia.
There's the middle space, which is the former USSR.
And then there's the South, which is mostly the Middle East.
According to Brzezinski's analysis, a situation that could be seen as a win for U.S. interests is one where the former USSR comes closer to the U.S.'s orbit, where the East doesn't outright expel the United States.
United States and where the South section doesn't end up, quote, subjected to domination by a single player.
Quote, the very scale and diversity of Eurasia, as well as the power of some of its states, limits the depth of American influence and the scope of control over the course of events.
That megacontinent is just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant towards even the most economically successful and politically preeminent global power.
One of the large reasons this is the case is because American influence is not based on the primary tool that has been used by Empire.
Brzezinski isn't saying that not taking over countries is a bad thing and that we should change it or something.
That's not the case.
Here's the passage where imperial mobilization comes up.
Quote, it's also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad.
This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation.
Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy.
But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being.
Anyway, Alex will often misrepresent the grant and chessboard, and I guess in this case he got his primary sources confused, because basically the imperial mobilization in the context of that quote is something that he's saying that this isn't something that...
Ten future members of his administration were among the 25 initial founding members of the group, and also that group did include Jeb Bush, but not George W. The group did hold heavy influence in the Bush years, but the way Alex is talking about this is just cartoonish.
Also, the PNAC document ends with a list of people who, quote, participated in at least one project meeting or contributed a paper for discussion.
Yeah, come on.
the subject he's talking about a disservice by having no grasp of basic details and making up so much extraneous stuff as to make his stories just more interesting he's just trying to add a sort of flavor to it and it's it's changing things past the point of it even resembling reality right opposition to the project for the new american century is impotent if it's based on an understanding of the group that you'd get from listening to alex because it's just bluster and anger leading you down a dead end info
unidentified
wars is where healthy distrust goes to die right and that's really unfortunate yeah it seems to me that so many conspiracies like You know, like...
The way that this theory of the remote-controlled planes, it seems very popular on InfoWars at this point, which I don't think is something that Alex would want to own in the present.
So you have one last clip here, and I think one of the things that's really, really challenging when you're listening to this stuff is, like, earlier in this episode, we were talking about Alex trying to tell this caller, hey, look, no one's listening to your phone.
Maybe there will be something bigger than 9-11 that happens.
Now, you've got to be paying attention.
Maybe not all that closely, but you might notice how this caller asked what would happen if New York was nuked, and Alex immediately recontextualized that as the globalists attacking us.